I had a customer who came to me, asking me to derive a ROI for implementing Footprints and ITIL.I really don’t have an answer for that….. This is like asking “come up with a ROI for buying that screwdriver”. Footprints is a tool and ITIL is a framework, both to aid the IT department in several ways, but this is not an investment where you get to see the tangible benefits immediately.

Think of it another way round. With ITIL in place, we can solve several common issues we have in the IT organization nowadays:

1.IT issues reported by the customers are not resolved fast enough and sometimes fall into the “black hole”. (incident management)

$$$ wasted on the salary of the unproductive employee who is waiting for his Laptop being fixed.

2.A RFC gone wrong that caused the online ticket booking portal to be down for 1 week. (change management)

$$$ revenue lost and customer image ruined as they go towards the competitor’s web site.

3.Lack of info on the server capacities and buying a new hardware every time a new application comes on board. (capacity management)

5.Resolving repeated incidents occurring throughout the year where it shouldn’t if the root cause is determined. (problem management)

$$$ wasted on the salary of the helpdesk agent and customer satisfaction dropped

ITIL is a framework that sets the best practices of IT Management since the 1980s. These folks spent 30years of experience revising/implementing/improving ITIL till what it is today. Much as I would like to preach how wonderful this “screwdriver” is, the real measure of ROI still needs to be dependent on the “people” who uses it.